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Sun. Sep 22, 2002

What She Said

What She Said – Michele, being a mother unlike me, does a better job of articulating the feelings I got from watching the video of the woman with the bad joke for a name, Madelyn Toogood, beat her four year old child. And the child, not the mother, is the point: "She will think up a thousand reasons why she deserved that beating because, in the mind of a four year old, your mother does not hit you like that without a good reason."

As for me, when I saw that video repeatedly on Friday, I just wanted to grab that woman by the ponytail and slam her head on the pavement to show her how it feels to have a larger person treat her with overwhelming violence. Not a response of which I’m proud, but that’s what I felt.

And when I heard her say yesterday, ”Somebody’s been judge, jury and executioner of my child for a mistake I made,” I want to do it again. Ms. Toogood was the one who acted as Judge, Jury, and Executioner of her child, and it is Ms. Toogood who is responsible for the consequences of those actions: the loss of her child.

She seems to think her child is suffering in the care of the state, but her child is no longer subjected to the random wrath of her mother, or the ”care” of her aunt who witnessed the entire beating from 8 feet away and did nothing, or the ”protection” of a family that wouldn’t tell authorities where the child was.

There’s only one victim here. And she’s four years old.